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That reminds me of this article: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ They us

That reminds me of this article: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ They used genetic algorithms to evolve digital circuits directly on FPGAs. The resulting design exploited things like electromagnetic interference to end up with a circuit much more efficient than a human could've created. In my mind this brings some interesting consequences for 'AI apocalypse' theories. If the AI understand everything, even an air gap might not be enough to contain it, since it might be able to repurpose some of its hardware for wireless communication in ways that we can't even imagine.

ACCount36 1y ago
In practice, we'll just let that AI have a direct internet connection, and also give it enough access to push code straight to prod. For the good measure.
- gpderetta 1y ago
  Don't forget about full control of the terminators.
otikik 1y ago
I don't remember the title, but someone wrote a story were an AI would use the (imperceptible) flickering of a fluorescent lightbulb and a camera to transmit information across such an "air gap".
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- NilMostChill 1y ago
  There's a comic out right now positing that a sufficiently intelligent AI with appropriate access could use imperceptible (to us) vibrations from mechanical computing parts like spinning rust HDD's etc. It's a throwaway mechanic in the comic, but it seems plausible. In certain places the power companies are/were passing time information throughout the whole grid - https://www.nist.gov/publications/time-and-frequency-electrical-power-lines https://www.nist.gov/publications/time-and-frequency-electri...
  - khafra 1y ago
    That's not a comic, and it's not artificial superintelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05915 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05915 Whatever AI comes up with by 2030 is going to be much more clever and unexpected.
    - NilMostChill 1y ago
      The comic(manga actually) i was referring to was "Origin" by the manga author Boichi. I'll have a read of the paper, seems like it's similar in concept
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    You don't need an AI to come up with remote sensing or air gap traversal capabilities though. Note for example TEMPEST surveillance, or using a distant laser to pickup speech in a room based on window vibrations. Air-gap traversal is easily done by exploiting human weaknesses (e.g. curiousity to pick up a USB drive to see what's on it), and was successfully done by Stuxnet.
    - NilMostChill 1y ago
      Indeed, there are lots of methods, but i was specifically thinking of the possibility of a method an isolated AI might feasibly figure out with only the tools it has easily available to it. But as someone said earlier, the real interesting part is when/if they start figuring out novel concepts we as humans haven't even considered.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Not unheard of, there was a paper about doing keylogging through the tiny EM fluctuations from a computer's power supply for example: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10197022 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10197022 Or data exfiltration through fan noise (60 bits/min): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167404820300080 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674... Or data transfer between computers using only speakers: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03422 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03422 The list goes on.
yencabulator 1y ago
My favorite part: > Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest — with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output — yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.

ACCount36 1y ago

In practice, we'll just let that AI have a direct internet connection, and also give it enough access to push code straight to prod. For the good measure.

gpderetta 1y ago
Don't forget about full control of the terminators.

otikik 1y ago

I don't remember the title, but someone wrote a story were an AI would use the (imperceptible) flickering of a fluorescent lightbulb and a camera to transmit information across such an "air gap".

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
NilMostChill 1y ago
There's a comic out right now positing that a sufficiently intelligent AI with appropriate access could use imperceptible (to us) vibrations from mechanical computing parts like spinning rust HDD's etc. It's a throwaway mechanic in the comic, but it seems plausible. In certain places the power companies are/were passing time information throughout the whole grid - https://www.nist.gov/publications/time-and-frequency-electrical-power-lines https://www.nist.gov/publications/time-and-frequency-electri...
- khafra 1y ago
  That's not a comic, and it's not artificial superintelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05915 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05915 Whatever AI comes up with by 2030 is going to be much more clever and unexpected.
  - NilMostChill 1y ago
    The comic(manga actually) i was referring to was "Origin" by the manga author Boichi. I'll have a read of the paper, seems like it's similar in concept
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  You don't need an AI to come up with remote sensing or air gap traversal capabilities though. Note for example TEMPEST surveillance, or using a distant laser to pickup speech in a room based on window vibrations. Air-gap traversal is easily done by exploiting human weaknesses (e.g. curiousity to pick up a USB drive to see what's on it), and was successfully done by Stuxnet.
  - NilMostChill 1y ago
    Indeed, there are lots of methods, but i was specifically thinking of the possibility of a method an isolated AI might feasibly figure out with only the tools it has easily available to it. But as someone said earlier, the real interesting part is when/if they start figuring out novel concepts we as humans haven't even considered.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Not unheard of, there was a paper about doing keylogging through the tiny EM fluctuations from a computer's power supply for example: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10197022 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10197022 Or data exfiltration through fan noise (60 bits/min): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167404820300080 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674... Or data transfer between computers using only speakers: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03422 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03422 The list goes on.

yencabulator 1y ago

My favorite part: > Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest — with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output — yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.